For Atlanta Filmmakers, Shooting First Feature Like ‘Going To Camp’

When the patriarch of a family passes away, one can expect mourning and some amount of family strife. If you throw in one prodigal daughter and several jars of moonshine, you have the new film “Pop-Pop Is Dead.”

The film, a comedy about a funeral, set in Gaffney, South Carolina, is the feature-length debut from the filmmaking team Coki Productions, led by Frey Forde and Catherine Holly. The two previously took their short film, “Good Hair,” to the Just For Laughs Comedy Festival in Montreal in 2017.

“We made the film in my childhood home,” Holly tells City Lights host Lois Reitzes, saying that the story was inspired by her own grandmother’s funeral and her trip back home to Gaffney. “Going through that experience with my family, I felt like it was this chapter of adulthood, when someone in your life passes.”

“And the chaos that happens afterward,” Forde chimes in.

Shot over eight days, the ensemble comedy begins as Layla Bailey, the youngest granddaughter of “Pop-Pop” Bailey, returns home from Los Angeles for the funeral. She finds her siblings Rory and Laura and their families bickering over who gets Pop-Pop’s house.

Though being fought over on film, the house served as home base for the entire cast and crew over the course of the shoot.

“It was literally camp,” Forde says. “It was all of our favorite artists, and we just spent all this time [together]”

“Air mattresses everywhere,” Holly adds.

“I think it added to the film,” Forde says. “We were trying to create a family, and that family has to show in the final product. So by being so close together, by spending all this time together, we walked out of it feeling like a real family, and I think that carried into the film itself.”

Nearly all of the cast grew up in small Southern towns like Gaffney (Forde himself grew up just one town over in Greenville), and Holly says it was important to them to be able to tell the story with both humor and compassion.

“I think a lot of times [small towns] aren’t represented in the media,” she says, “or when they are, it’s in this very ‘reality TV’ kind of negative light. There were many times where I was like ‘this isn’t like my family at all,’ and so wanted to show that world a little bit.”

“Yeah, we wanted to humanize the stereotypes behind the people who live in these small towns,” Forde says, “specifically given the last few years and all the talk about the rural areas of the world. We want to show the human part.

“Pop-Pop Is Dead” premiers at the Buckhead Theatre, Wednesday at 8 p.m.